Monday, June 30, 2014

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Make sure the path is a long, narrow, and winding one, and that there is no parking anywhere near it, and the world will keep buying the old mousetrap featured conveniently at the suburban mall hardware store.

A thoughtful merchant would locate his store near a big, well-traveled road and include several acers of parking. A socialist greenie city councilman or woman would try to make this illegal. A forward-looking entrepreneur would note this and avoid locating in such an area. An old, established merchant would be thinking of buying ads that go:"Drive a little, save a lot. Visit our new location just outside the city limits!"

An electorate that could see past next week would be voting the dingbat out.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

CBS puts up a piece of what it no doubt considers to be sage advice: If the GOP is to survive, it must embrace the Dems polices on immigration. Now "comprehensive immigration reform" is Demospeak for immediately naturalizing the entire population of the world, and make it quick because there's an election coming up.

The problem with reaching across the aisle is that Lucy will pull the football, the conservative base will stay home, and the Libs wouldn't vote for anyone with an R beside their name if it would save their own family from the camps. How dumb do they think we are?

I borrowed this one from Top Shot as it appealed to my predilection for a difficult shot from simple materials.

Here are 5 Q-tips at 1:1 scale as measured from the ones I had around the house. You get 10 shots, 2 on each Q-tip. You get credit for breaking the Q-tip stick twice on each stick so touching the outside of the stick (nick) gets you 5 points, and touching both sides of a stick (clean break) gets you 10. You get to "break" each stick twice or "nick" each stick as many times as you want so each stick can be "broken" twice and/or be "nicked" as many times as you want. Only 2 breaks per stick count however.

All classes to be shot at 25-30 feet, standing, unsupported.

Taking a cue from Engineering Johnson, if you hit all five sticks, it's worth an extra 10 points, so the maximum possible score is 110.

Classes:

1A – Iron sight rimfire pistol

1B - Iron sight rimfire rifle

2A – Iron sight centerfire pistol

2B - Iron sight centerfire rifle

3A – Optical sight rimfire pistol

3B - Optical sight rimfire rifle

4A – Optical sight centerfire pistol

4B - Optical sight centerfire rifle

5 – Open class: Anything else.

Rifle and pistol scores will be posted together and the A or B designation noted. This target seems to favor the larger caliber stuff so feel free to drag out that S&W .500 mag and have a go. Send your targets in to bllew(at)rmi(dot)net.

In addition to a long fun day at the range I got to test some new (to me) bullets and powder in the Hi Point. Switching from Barrys plated to some RNFP jacketed bullets in 155gr weight was an eye-opener. Now in all fairness, Barrys does not recommend using their plated bullets at muzzle velocities greater than about 1200 fps as the plating is prone to come off. This means that they work fine for nearly all pistol applications in eliminating lead fouling.

When the plating starts coming off, however, accuracy goes the way of the wild goose, and muzzle velocity becomes much more widely variable. In the Hi Point, the longer barrel boosts muzzle velocity 250-300 fps over what you would expect from a pistol of the same caliber putting the speed well above Barry's recommendation.

FWIW: Using Titegroup, my favorite one-size-fits-all powder, the 155 gr jacketed bullets delivered an average of 1418 +/- 23 fps and group size of 3MOA shooting off sandbags.This is about 60 fps faster than the plated bullets, and 3 MOA closer groups. This accuracy references loading Barrys bullets at sub-minimum loads resulting in MV's around 1250-1300 fps. If you load upward, the "groups" quickly expand to the point where they were measured in feet at 100 yards. It's not the gun, it's the bullets. Use jacketed above 1200 fps.

Switching to Power Pistol confirms the thought that slower powder would work better in a longer barrel with MV up to 1579+/-27 fps and about the same accuracy.

Friday, June 27, 2014

“If you can’t sign a lease, if you can’t get a bank
account, if you can’t do the basics, if you can’t even prove who
you are, it doesn’t feel like you truly belong,” de Blasio, a
53-year-old Democrat, said in April, in support of the card.

Of course if you're here illegally, you may get the feeling that you don't belong because in fact, you don't. It's called a clue.

Hyundai's new Genesis is their entry into the luxury car market and comes with all sorts of bells and whistles including a combination radar detector, obstacle detector, and brake applicator. Now as you drive the car detects not only the posted limit somehow, but also the radar associated with photo traps and automatically slows the car well before the camera flashes.

In TV commercials, it replaces driver awareness by applying the brakes to bring the car to a complete stop before the distracted teenage driver can hit the car stopped in front of him. I suppose that before we can have completely self-driving cars, we need to get the great unwashed public used to the phenomena.

A quick-thinking city bureaucrat would budget money for some flea-powered transmitters to broadcast on the photo radar frequency and install one every 500 yards or so thus preventing the cars from ever exceeding the speed limit anywhere inside the city limits.

"It will beep 800 metres before a camera and show the legal speed, and it will beep at you if your speed is over that."
By coupling those self-braking systems with camera locations loaded into
the car's navigation software, the car will warn drivers ahead of speed
traps and slow down if required.

At this point the warnings and braking work best when the cars GPS knows where the speed cameras are and less well with the portable camera vans I see around here.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Last year our SOS Scott Gessler spent a fair amount of time scrutinizing the states voter rolls looking for people registered in multiple precincts, registered voters who neglected to mention their lack of U.S. citizenship, etc.

Turns out he was looking in the wrong places. The biggest group of questionable voters in Colorado are those also registered in other states. So the biggest part of illegal voting comes not from illegal aliens, but from retirees who winter in Denver to get away from the cold weather in Pierre, or Arizonians with a vacation home in the mountains. Buy a car to keep in Colorado? Get registered to vote at the same time, and with our new all-mail-in ballots, you'll get yours even if you're currently in your other state.

Watchdog.org reported on Wednesday that a multi-state database of voter registration information from Secretaries of State shows that as many as 300,000 Coloradans
may also be registered to vote in other states. That comes to just
over 1 in 12 registered Colorado voters, and it raises additional
questions about the difficulty of ensuring clean voter rolls in the
light of recent loosening of the rules, up to and including same-day
voter registration without adequate identification.

That's 300,000 and Texas and California are not participants in the cross-check system. Those two are the two most (or least, depending on your POV) popular sources for immigration into Colorado. All these dual-registered folks will get a mail-in ballot for the upcoming election.

That batch of gun laws that the Dems whooped through last year got their first hearing in federal court, and the judge says that while they may be frivolous, ineffective, burdensome and whatever else, they aren't unconstitutional.

An appeal is expected, but I'm thinking the odds are against us. States can do a lot on their own and federal judges are notably sympathetic to the positions of the federal government.

Of course there IS an election coming up in 5 months and what a legislature can give, a new one can take away.

When the gun controllers boast that "90% of people surveyed support more gun control" how do you fact check that? Certainly if you ask people if barking moonbats should have firearms nearly everyone will agree that they should not. This does not, however, support the notion that some panel of appointed nannies should get a vote on your next gun.

Dan Cannon at Guns Save Lives checked the premise by Googling the various key words and phrases. Turns out the NRA is more popular than any of the anti-gun groups to the point that searches for the antis are down in the statistical noise.

In the interest of fairness, I note that searches for "NRA" typically run about 50% higher than searches for "gun control" which is statistically significant. Both are dwarfed by searches for "AR-15" although this could be explained by journalists looking up the term to see what it actually is in addition to ordinary citizens looking to buy one.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Or re-elected as the case may be, and you find yourself on the wrong side of an issue, say gun control. What do you do? Of course if you represent a carefully Gerrymandered district, you can come out strongly in favor of more gun laws and the papers will quote you approvingly. If you don't, you simply say nothing. That way the issue never gets any coverage. It's not like the media will ask you any questions on the topic.

What if your campaign is fighting an uphill battle, and an anti-gun celebrity offers to speak out on your behalf?

You stiff-arm them, as quietly and as diplomatically as possible. Keeping it quiet insures that your base doesn't think you're backsliding on the issue and your complete silence on the issue may convince some of the middle that you might not be a hard-core grabber. Remember the Obama rule: The less they know about you, the better your chances.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Yesterday was the 35th annual kinetic sculpture race, now held in Longmont, having been evicted from Boulder. The strange contraptions are there

along with some simple but effective vehicles:

This one featured a ducted fan and two methods for steering. It seemed to move fairly well. It was called Zebra Mussel Invasion.

The shark had been there before. It's well built and fast. The wheels are removed when it hits the water which slows things down for a minute or two while things get relocated, but the pickup in speed more than makes up for it. I believe they finished first followed closely by a cage full of rabbits.

This thing has rear wheel steering, retractable wheels, and is so old it is now being driven by the grandchildren of the original builder.

I get to bring my pop can mortar up and fire it for the start gun. Any more it's the only time I can fire it as my new gun club won't allow it.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Ken Bingenheimer at Motorcycles Colorado notes that last Monday was national Ride To Work day when we are all supposed to take our motorcycles to work. This is the first I've heard of the observation. For me Ride To Work day is any day the morning temp is above 37 deg and the probability of precipitation is no more than 30% so I did my part.

Coming right up is Bike To Work day which is similar except you're expected to ride a 2-wheeler with no motor on it to work. There's a story about the flyer that flogs this event:

In fact there are several stories about that right here on this blog. Search Bike To Work in the search window, upper left corner. So far the motorized version has been nicer to me than the pedaled one, at least while going to work so on June 25th I'll be on the road with the fellow depicted above. Hi Ken!

Last week the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, through the power of Dodd-Frank, passed a rule giving the agency unprecedented power to shut down businesses, no matter what the reason, at any time it wishes through a cease-and-desist order.

The key phrase here is "passed a rule". The agency seems to require no other justification that that it will please the president. No immediate information as th which businesses they plan to shut down but in addition to the usual stuff the puritans want to close like "gentleman's clubs" , payday loan operations, gun stores, and dirty book stores, there's private schools and guitar makers who donate to "terrorist" causes, like the Republican party.

It's good to be able to write your own rules as you go along as the EPA has shown us, and the only relief from unbridled power grabs like this is legislative. Of course the House can prohibit, and Harry reid can delete the prohibition, so BOLO for the next 2 years.

Doctors in North Carolina are being asked to judge their patients competency to carry a concealed weapon. No word as to whether this is being done in other states, but my doctor has never asked to see any of my match targets or my finish position at the IDPA matches.

This of course brings up the question of which is better; Someone who finishes low in a competition or someone who hasn't fired their gun since they got their permit.

The requests put the doctors in a bad position as they stand to get sued either way. I wonder if there's a box that can be checked stating that firearms usage is not within a doctors area of expertise? The overall approval rate is running about 80% but no word as to what criteria are being used.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

You may or may not have built it or bought it, whatever it is, but you certainly don't own it as the government's revocation of copyrights to the Washington Redskins name abundantly demonstrates.

Hold a patent or copyright? If the government wishes, or if said patent or copyright offends the Dear Leader, than poof! it's gone. Own property? If the government feels it could be collecting higher taxes on it if it were put to a different use, than poof! it's declared "blighted", taken from you, and sold at a discount to a politically favored developer.

So now add the U.S. Patent office to the list of agencies whose function includes doing the administrations bidding. It's looking a lot like Zimbabwe here.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

I'm a fan of Paul Elio's commuter vehicle, having built something similar myself and found it to be a great deal of fun. The difference is that his looks like a carefully thought through vehicle, and mine looked like a fugitive from a Mad Max movie set.

I subscribed to the publicity flaks from their marketing department and I get a new on about twice a week now. The vehicle when I saw it, admittedly a beta prototype, was described as soon-to-be 70 hp and about 900 lb. This would have been a quite respectable power to weight ratio, putting the vehicle in there with the V-6 Honda Accord.

I noticed that the available horsepower has been declining which I suspect is a result of increasing weight as the items not included on the prototype got bolted on and the 84 MPG number remained inviolate. Here are some numbers for comparison:

I'm not bashing the Elio, I know exactly what they are going through. The current model now sports a climate control system, decent radio, and windshield wipers that the earlier prototype (P3) didn't have. I'm sure it has other stuff that doesn't show and normally doesn't get mentioned. This stuff adds up and when you start with so little weight, every pound is a much larger percentage of the total.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Following the report that there had been some 74 mass shootings in schools since Sandy Hook, which proved to be off by, um, 74, Pravda By The Platte has published a letter going even further.

One Craig Smith is claiming that since 2000 (14 years) "there have been 145 separate gun related* incidents in school buildings, near school property, and on school buses - while school was in session - that resulted in 195 deaths."

No source cited, but really, with criteria like "near school property"? There have been as I remember, about 30,000 gun related (?) deaths per year in every year since 2000, practically all of which took place in a zip code that included a school of some sort. This is not quite the same as 30,000 school kids shot to death by deranged Liberals, but, as he says, who's counting?

195 deaths over 14 years is just shy of 14/year and while it would certainly be nice to get that down to zero, I might point out that that's less than two weeks toll for Chicago alone. Somehow I suspect that reducing the thug population would reduce the mortality rate in schools and everywhere else far more effectively than a gun ban.

*Gun related? You mean there was a gun involved even if only chewed from a pop tart?

Vitamin A prevents blindness in children. It's good for adults as well. In equatorial regions, it's hard to come by unless you plant Golden Rice, so named for the yellow color, or grow a new strain of banana recently developed.

Alas, you can't as the Green Nannys have proclaimed such food "dangerous" and demand a ban on them.

Monday, June 16, 2014

Been thinking about GBR for this year which will be in September unless it gets changed. I live about 800 miles away as the crow flies, or about 1600 miles as Southwest Airlines does it. TBD miles but 24 hours on Amtrak, or about 1000 miles on I-70. Driving means bringing as much junk as I can fit into the car and no TSA checks BUT lately law enforcement has been targeting cars with Colorado plates.

Perhaps what I need is one of those diamond-shaped window hangers that usually says "Baby on Board" only mine would read "Driver carries NO weed!"

Been trying to find one of those on-line sticker printers so I could make a prototype, but essentially no one seems to make that style of sign. Probably wouldn't work anyway as I've noticed that the police are seldom disposed to take my word for anything.

Story suggesting that O'Bummer is getting depressed with the way fewer and fewer people are buying into the God-King myth any more. I'm sure it's depressing when that happens, but on the bright side, he doesn't actually have to take it any longer.

Think about doing as the rest of us do: Take early retirement. By now I'm sure he has enough boodle stashed away in places with "flexible" banking laws to cover expenses for the foreseeable future. Plus, wherever he goes, he gets a suite of armed bodyguards to come along with at our expense.

The couple have also never sold their family home in Chicago’s Hyde Park
neighborhood, a fact that prompts speculation they will return there
after his White House tenure ends.

So start the pool now. Where will the lightbringer land? My bet is on Indonesia where the money goes further and a lot of his friends live. Then again I hear he's picked up a place in North Carolina so maybe he'll stick around to advise Hillary. It'll make a nice backup to the $35M place he already owns in Hawaii.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Went out yesterday for a bike ride along the myriad waterways only to discover that part of the Dry Creek trail was blocked off by the Englewood police who were investigating a dead body. No real info yet and aside from the decedent, probably none to come either. The death is described as "suspicious" which would be appropriate for anyone who drowned in Dry Creek.

The location was about 1/2 mile downstream from where I had my own near death experience a few years ago.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Anyone who knows anything about modern e-mail servers knows that "lost" e-mails in a commercial setting is complete B.S.. "Bagdad Bob" Carney having stepped down, here's an offering of an excuse from Twitter:

Governor Chickenpooper has apologized to the assembled sheriffs of Colorado for being the man who, after the legislature had put the public up on a chair, placed the rope around our neck and tied it snugly to the tree limb, personally pulled the chair out from under us giving us a bunch of onerous, useless gun laws, extra regulation, and legalizing vote fraud. Nice of him to do so, no?

This is probably a mistake unless you think you're about to be turned out by the angry mob. Stalin, after all never apologized for his excesses, and Putin certainly isn't done yet so no contrition there either.

This time the time scale is more drawn out and the media have gotten into positions where they can watch and report pretty much as it happens. The president has said he will send no help at all as the Iraqi Air Force attempts to evacuate the contractors from the base. The problem is that the ISIS folks by now have heavy machine guns on trucks which would make landing a slow, lumbering C-130 a really questionable proposition.

Pilots all know this and finding one has become a problem as well.

So here we are again, with the administration no doubt looking for a video maker to toss in jail or perhaps getting ready to offer the entire population of Gitmo in exchange for the contractors which would be seen as slightly better than simply issuing them all presidential pardons on his way out the door.

Friday, June 13, 2014

Hadn't seen any squirrels in the back yard, possibly because they all starved last winter but with a bumper crop of apples and plums coming along I thought I'd put out the trap, just in case.

Set it up Wednesday morning before I went to work. By Wednesday evening I had a trifecta. Only problem with that is that while the bottom 2 squirrels die peacefully, the top one gets to stand on his unfortunate predecessors until you remove the pipe at which time you get the slow emergence of a bedraggled tree rat who escapes if you're not quick enough with the pipe.

Fortunately squirrels have a slow learning curve. Re-bait the trap and you'll get the escapee within 12 hours, and in my case, another one as well so 4 down by Thursday PM. Trash day is Friday, usually late in the morning, so set up again and bag another in time for the collector. Unfortunately #6 showed up right after the truck had left. Had to bury that one. Still, a good start. I may yet get some fruit this year.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

The actual agenda of course is a comprehensive ban on the use of fire. Return with us now to the good old days when we all lived in harmony with nature, huddled together for warmth, and ate meat raw as nature intended.

While noting the short-term benefits of the natural gas “bonanza,”
Revkin cautioned that “crunchier” government policies were necessary to
kickstart clean technologies and impose sanctions on carbon emissions.
“By itself, switching to gas will not reduce emissions to anything
like the levels required to avoid a high risk of serious climate
change,” Revkin wrote.

The peasants must be forced to not use abundant energy supplies so as to allow the far less efficient alternative and renewable resources to move forward. By the way, "crunchier " policies means jacking your heating and fuel bills through the roof.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Installed a hoist/trolley in the garage. I didn't remember climbing around in the attic was all that difficult the last time but is has been quite some time.

Got 4 books to read, so I'll try not to get too exercised over the news. Any more the news is developing a distinct air of deja-vu about it as the administration pivots from one SNAFU to the next. In good economic news, the WSJ is reporting that all the jobs lost when Obama took office have been regained:

Of course some of the better jobs have been replaced with burger flippers, but if you've seen one job you've seen them all, right? Besides I'm told that everyone now has health care. Sort of.

Note also that this takes us to the same number of employed people as in 2007 and makes no allowance for the population to be increasing.

About time I say. Gun Watch notes that the price rollback signs that Wal Mart is so fond of are now appearing at the ammo shelves. 12 ga, for example is reported to be down to pre-panic prices. Last time I was there I noticed that they had sufficient stock of pretty much everything with the sole exception of .22. They were also back to the usual practice of having one sales associate assigned per acre of floor space and that associate was not in vire of the sporting goods department.

The predictions are cheerfully optomistic, bur one can hope:

Metal prices have already fallen from the highs of the bubble. Copper
and lead are far lower than they were. You will know that the bubble
is close to the bottom when you see .22 LR on sale for below 4 cents per
round. At the lowest, we might see .22 cartridges below $10 for 500.

Missed the gun show last weekend so I don't know if the crash is genuinely starting around here, but I do know there is plenty of .22 out there waiting for its owners to realize that +$65/brick is no longer a viable assumption.

Looking over the article on the Seattle shooting, I got to thinking: The gunman was using a shotgun, presumably a pump action or semi-auto and not a "Biden Special. The hero in the affair used pepper spray to augment his rush on the shooter as he was reloading.

Typically an auto-loading or pump action shotgun will carry 5+1 rounds, so the shooter was limited to 6 rounds to start with. Just think; if shotguns (and everything else) were limited to two rounds like Joe B's, the shooter might have been stopped much quicker.Arguments in favor of 2-round capacity begin in 3...2...1...

Of course if the building monitor had been a CCW with a typical pistol. the shooter might not have been able to kill anyone. Remember: Mass shootings don't happen because there's a man with a gun. They happen because there's only ONE man with a gun.

A computer posing as a 13 year old Ukranian schoolboy passed the Turing test by convincing 30% of those tho "spoke" with it (via keyboards) that is was a real human.

Computing pioneer Alan Turing said that a computer could be understood
to be thinking if it passed the test, which requires that a computer
dupes 30 per cent of human interrogators in five-minute text
conversations.

Key to this success I believe was the computer claiming to be a 13 year old boy, thus one would not expect it/him to be terribly glib or knowledgeable.

*Had the program claimed to have been a 28 year old college grad Obama voter, it would have done much better. Under that circumstance, a magic 8-ball might well have passed.